Although good, healthy food was foreign to the Famely family, they made up for it with quantity. Back in our room I laid out our feast on the fake wood coffee table-fried chicken, coleslaw, biscuits, and applesauce. The only things that were green were the straws for our sodas.

“All the basic food groups: grease, mayo, bread, and sugar,” I said.

“Don’t knock it. You’ll be amazed at how easily it all goes down,” Caroline said, opening the Styrofoam boxes. “It’s better than it sounds. We eat this way all the time when Jason has an away game.” Her face darkened and I wondered if she was thinking of her previous life or all those away games long ago that had gotten her into this mess.

My dining standards having plummeted in the last few years, I inhaled the food but swapped out my biscuits for her applesauce. We said little while we ate, just listened to the buzz of some inane low-budget reality show now turned up loud to drown out the shower noises and toilet flushes we could hear through the hotel’s cardboard walls.

“Want to tell me about Kate?” I said after we finished eating. I thought that’s where she was heading when we fled her house.

“Not really,” she said, with a laugh. She told me anyway.

“As soon as Kate got out of prison, she got in touch with my brother. She didn’t ask if he knew where I was, just sent him money. A lot of money. He used some of it…mostly for my father, but he put the rest of it away for me.”

So that’s why she still considered Kate a friend.

“You stayed in touch with him while you were on the run? Wasn’t that risky?”

“Not really,” she said again. “Another lesson learned from Sherry, the girl I met in New York. I wonder what happened to her.”

In Florida, Caroline had gotten college kids to mail postcards for her when they returned home from spring break. They’d be sent from all over the country, even from the UK, and wouldn’t have a Miami postmark. Eventually, three and a half years after she last saw him, she thought it might be safe and sent her brother an unsigned postcard asking him to meet her at the Delano in South Beach.

“He came to Florida and brought me the money. That’s what I was living on when I met Grant.”

“What did you live on the first three years?”

“Don’t ask.”

Holy cow, and I thought this woman just stayed home and did needlepoint and baked cookies.

“That’s why I don’t think Kate would do anything to harm me. If she didn’t expose me then, why would she do it now?”

“Does that mean you think she’s still alive?” I asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I just know she wouldn’t hurt me.”

Thirty-five

If Kate was off our list, as Caroline had insisted, she was the only one we’d been able to eliminate so far. Who had hired Countertop Man to track down Caroline? Who had come after me in the parking lot? Who had sent the threatening note with the charm? It was close to midnight and my brain was getting fuzzy, probably from all the poisons coursing through my system from the crap food, which did, as Caroline predicted, go down far too easily.

We still hadn’t heard from Lucy and Grant, and I was getting worried-then I realized it wasn’t likely Lucy would call my cell. She knew how bad I was about remembering to turn it on. She probably would have called on the landline. I checked the cell anyway. There was only one voice mail message. From Roxy Rhodes. Did I know how to reach Grant Sturgis? Kevin Brookfield was close to making an offer on the nursery and she wanted me to see if Grant was still interested. Especially since Kevin and I were friends, too.

“What’s the matter?” Caroline said, looking adorable in her son’s oversized, albeit smelly, hockey shirt. “You look puzzled.”

I was. Why would Roxy think I knew more about Kevin Brookfield than she’d told me? I’d only met him once, that time at the diner when I was planting false lamiums for Babe. We’d barely exchanged words.

Despite the hour, I called Lucy and she picked up on the first ring. After pretending to be Caroline, she and Grant had driven in circles for hours trying to elude the press and had decided to stop for the night. She hadn’t seen anyone at the dumpy motel where they’d pulled in and felt they were in the clear. Lucy sounded exhilarated over her adventure; I doubted Grant Sturgis was having as much fun.

“Can I talk to him?” I said.

“He’s in the shower and I’m waiting for a pizza. That’s the only thing they’ll deliver to this extremely humble establishment.”

There was a bizarre echo on the phone, the repeating sound of traffic and bells, like those on a vehicle that was backing up.

“What’s that noise?” I asked. “Where are you?”

“It’s a dive, but Sturgis got all weepy when he saw the name. Some fleabag called the Hacienda.”

Ten minutes later Lucy and Grant joined us in our room, two doors from their own. After their tearful reunion, I hated to break it to them that if there had been any reporters following them they’d soon be at the Hacienda, but Grant and Lucy were positive they had evaded any cars that might have been on their tail.

“Early on I saw a Civic and an SUV following us-couldn’t tell what make because he was behind the Honda.” Lucy was good with anything that had a label. “Both cars were light colored.”

“Out-of-state plates?”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t recognize which state. Remember when each state had one type of license plate and you could play name-that-state on long driving trips? Now there are three or four to choose from. I’m pretty sure the plate was dark blue and white.”

“Maybe we should leave,” I said.

“C’mon, we lost them. No one’s here. Can’t we at least wait until the pizza comes? It’s Frank Pepe. It’s supposed to be wonderful.” Lucy said. “I had to give my credit card, so I’ve already paid for it. And I haven’t eaten all day.”

We took a vote. If there was no activity outside the hotel in the time that it took the pizza to come, we’d stay. By morning Caroline would have to surface somewhere, and when she did it wouldn’t take long for whoever wanted to find her to find her, but we’d deal with that tomorrow.

Lucy, sans wig, and I went to the front desk when the pizza arrived and we went to her room to let Grant and Caroline have their first private visit in weeks.

And that’s what would have happened if ten minutes later the cops hadn’t burst into both of our rooms.

Props to the desk clerk who I had dismissed as a nerdy loser, so unobservant that he checked in two women as mother and son. When Lucy and Grant arrived, ordered a pizza under a different name than they registered under, and then switched partners with us, the clerk-who probably watched a lot of true crime stories on television-decided I was a madam who’d brought a teenage boy to a motel for an assignation with a man while I ate pizza with the guy’s wife. Lord knows what he thought we were doing. It was the stuff of supermarket tabloids.

Once the cops discovered Caroline was not a young boy but a middle-aged woman dressed as a boy, they reckoned it was simply kinky sex, none of their business, and they left the four of us alone. Hey, if consenting adults wanted to play the housewife and the UPS man or the contessa and the chauffeur, what was it to them? Needless to say, for Grant and Caroline, the moment had been ruined.